As Australia is voting today on the introduction of a carbon tax, the Libs (conservatives), with Tony as the chief paddler on that great Egyptian river — denial — are doing everything in their idiotic fanfares to forget that once (1990), they had the concept well grasped...

And here we are more than twenty years later and the Libs (conservatives) have backpedalled furiously with the help of an idiotic misunderstanding called Abbott, whose hypocrisy on protecting the planet is based solely on the flat earth society, the resentment of election defeat and the gnarly shouts from the bigots of god.

Aussie, NZ soldiers help drought-stricken Tuvalu

Updated October 14, 2011 15:53:52

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-14/tuvalu-struggles-amid-water-crisis/3571716

 

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Melbourne wood machinist Darryl Soutaris went to Cambodia for the first time in late September and became caught up in the worst floods to hit the country in more than a decade.

Nearly 250 people have been killed in the past two months of flooding in Cambodia, while rising floodwaters are also wreaking havoc on neighbouring Thailand.

Here Darryl shares his photos from Siem Reap in Cambodia's north and tells ABC News Online about what he saw.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-10-14/flooding-in-cambodia-in-pictures/3571430

With the glaciers melting , there are fears of catastrophic floods for the villages below, writes Suzanne Goldenberg in Nepal.

It is strangely calming to watch the Imja glacier lake grow, as chunks of ice part from black cliffs and fall into the grey-green lake below.

But the lake is a high-altitude disaster in the making - one of dozens of danger zones emerging across the Himalayas as glaciers melt due to climate change. If the lake, at 5100 metres in Nepal's Everest region, breaks through its walls of glacial debris, known as moraine, it could release a deluge of water, mud and rock as far as 100 kilometres.

This would swamp homes and fields with a layer of rubble up to 15 metres thick, leading to the loss of the land for a generation. But the question is when, rather than if.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/disaster-looms-as-himalayas-heat-up-20111014-1lp62.html#ixzz1aoxZavwd

GORAKHPUR, India — Pedestrians weave their way through a sea of cars, rickshaws and motorbikes, a desperate scramble for space just making the gridlock worse. The sidewalks are swallowed up by stalls and piles of garbage. The smell of open drains hangs in the air while overhead a web of electric cables crisscrosses the sky.

India is one of the main engines of global population growth, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the crowded northern state of Uttar Pradesh, home to 200 million people. The world’s 7 billionth person will be born on the last day of this month, according to U.N. estimates, and Uttar Pradesh, which added 33 million people to the global population in the last decade, is already staking its claim to be the birthplace of that child.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/amid-population-boom-india-hopes-for-demographic-dividend-but-fears-disaster/2011/10/12/gIQA9I4nmL_story.html?hpid=z3

 

As Sheldon would say "stop having coitus, please"...

Kathmandu, Nepal - Chungda Sherpa, a former herder from eastern Nepal, has a warning tale ahead of the United Nations climate change conference in Durban.

At World Wildlife Fund-Japan's 'Climate Witness' programme in Osaka and Tokyo this month, to apprise communities around the world how climate change is threatening lives and livelihoods, the 48-year-old described how the glacier on Mt Kanchenjunga, the third highest peak in the world, is shrinking rapidly.

"In 1957, when Swiss geologist Dr Toni Hagen took the photograph of the Gangapurna glacier on thenorthern slope of Mt Annapurna, it lay over the Manang valley. But recent photos show the glacier is now just a hanging strip. We have witnessed the change in our lifetime."

- Pradeep Moor

"When I was young... I was told it was one of the largest non-polar glaciers in the world," he said. "But it has retreated now and I can see glacial lakes forming, which could grow larger over time and become GLOFs (glacial lake outburst floods), posing a threat to our lives and property."

With global average temperature increasing by approximately 0.75 degrees Celsius in the last century, its most visible and direct effect can be seen on mountains, says Pradeep Mool, remote sensory expert at the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).



Shrinking glaciers

The shrinking and retreating of the Himalayan glaciers - which provide life-giving water to over a billion people - became visible after early 1970. Three decades later, the phenomenon accelerated, resulting in the formation of moraine-dammed glacial lakes which are swelling ominously.

There are over 20,000 glacial lakes in the Hindu Kush-Himalayas and a GLOF risk assessment report by ICIMOD in 2010 compiled a list of 179 potentially dangerous ones in China, India, Nepal and Pakistan. In addition, experts have identified another 25 in Bhutan.

Raj Pachauri, the Indian chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), became a controversial figure around the world in December 2009 when it was revealed that a claim in the IPCC's previous report about Himalayan glacier meltback was wildly inaccurate.

A paragraph buried on page 493 of the report, published in 2007, said that the likelihood of the glaciers disappearing by the year 2035 was "very high". When this was noticed, many scientists criticised it as ridiculous and it is now not accepted by mainstream science.

Dr Pauchauri at first attacked critics of the claim, accusing one of producing "voodoo science" and provoking a widespread controversy which became known as "Glaciergate". He was later forced to apologise and correct the claim in the IPCC report.

Yesterday, however, Dr Pachauri reasserted that the glaciers in general were melting back, after the publication of the most authoritative report produced on those in the Himalayan-Hindu Kush region.

The report, from the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) based in Kathmandu, used satellite data to establish the geography of the snow cover of Asia's giant mountains, revealing for the first time that the number of glaciers in the region is in excess of 54,000.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/glaciergate-part-ii-climate-chief-reheats-himalayas-row-6273288.html

Glaciers in the French Alps have lost a quarter of their area in the past 40 years, according to new research.

In the late 1960s/early 1970s, the ice fields slipping down Mont Blanc and the surrounding mountains of the European range covered some 375 sq km.

By the late 2000s, this area had fallen to about 275 sq km.

The research has been presented at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the world's largest annual gathering of Earth scientists.

It mirrors some findings of retreat occurring in other sectors of the Alps which sit across the borders of several nations, but predominantly Switzerland, Austria, Slovenia, Germany, France, and Italy.

The new French Alps glaciers inventory was produced by Marie Gardent, from the University of Savoie, and colleagues.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-16025568

 

Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said: "The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero."

The melting of Himalayan glaciers caused controversy in 2009 when a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change mistakenly stated that they would disappear by 2035, instead of 2350. However, the scientist who led the new work is clear that while greater uncertainty has been discovered in Asia's highest mountains, the melting of ice caps and glaciers around the world remains a serious concern.

"Our results and those of everyone else show we are losing a huge amount of water into the oceans every year," said Prof John Wahr of the University of Colorado. "People should be just as worried about the melting of the world's ice as they were before."

His team's study, published in the journal Nature, concludes that between 443-629bn tonnes of meltwater overall are added to the world's oceans each year. This is raising sea level by about 1.5mm a year, the team reports, in addition to the 2mm a year caused by expansion of the warming ocean.

The scientists are careful to point out that lower-altitude glaciers in the Asian mountain ranges – sometimes dubbed the "third pole" – are definitely melting. Satellite images and reports confirm this. But over the study period from 2003-10 enough ice was added to the peaks to compensate.

 

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/feb/08/glaciers-mountains

Swiss glaciers are melting away at an accelerating rate and many will vanish this century if climate projections are correct, two new studies suggest.

One assessment found that some 10 cubic km of ice have been lost from 1,500 glaciers over the past nine years.

The other study, based on a sample of 30 representative glaciers, indicates the group's members are now losing a metre of thickness every year.

Both pieces of work come out of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.

"The trend is negative, but what we see is that the trend is also steepening," said Matthias Huss from the Zurich university's Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7770472.stm

 

Unfortunately too many people still think that humans have no effect on the climate...  the silly swines... Meanwhile we are doing too little, either thinking we have no influence on climate or that we're too late to do anything, but:

 

The government’s key climate change advisory body has called for Australia to triple its target for reducing carbon emissions by 2020, with further, deeper cuts in the following decades.

A leaked Climate Change Authority report to the government advises that Australia should aim to slash emissions by 15% on 2000 levels by 2020.

This target should escalate to a 40% reduction by 2030 and 90% by 2050, according to the independent body. The report, which will recommend a reduction target and a upper limit on emissions under theupcoming “cap and trade” regime, is set to be handed to the government in October.

Now, Australia has an “unconditional” target of a 5% reduction in emissions by 2020. This goal has bipartisan support. This target is flexible, however, with the government committing to a reduction of up to 25%, depending on the “extent of international action” on climate change.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/02/emissions-reduction-target-15-percent

 

Read about global warming all over this site... including: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/19279